


Antihero

by AMyosotis



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, More Death, Warnings for death, and existential dread, sadstuck in 2018? it's more likely than you'd think
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-04
Updated: 2018-12-04
Packaged: 2019-09-06 08:32:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16828876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AMyosotis/pseuds/AMyosotis
Summary: AA: alpha dave still has a long way to goAA: hes still not at ease with his mortalityAA: but people like us have to be!AA: we have to be prepared to die a thousand deaths before our quest is completeAA: the master we serve demands itTG: soTG: im just one dead dave offered up to the time godAA: pretty much





	Antihero

You look down, and scuff your sneaker against a bit of cobalt rubble. 

The wind of LOWAS is cool against your face, and the sky is ashy-dark, fireflies suspended in it like glowing sparks. Your iShades slip a little down your nose at the new angle, and the blinking light splits and bleeds across your damp vision. Deep below you, underground, you can hear sludge burbling away, running through the metal pipes worked under the planet’s crust. It sounds like lava and you guess that makes sense, that molten rock and liquid muck might have similar viscosities. You sniffle a little. The shades slide further down and you clench your hands and keep still, not blinking so your eyes won’t spill over. This is fucking stupid.

Bro’s died dozens of times before—popped a fucking wheelie off to whatever his version of heaven is, ridden unreal air off to infinite creepy puppets and shitty Xbox games in the sky—and you’ve never teared up like a goddamn baby animal in a Disney movie over it. But you’re pretty sure this is the alpha timeline, which would mean he’s gone for good, and you had always sorta figured that part of what made the doomed timelines doomed was Bro dying. As if he were somehow required to live through bullshit alpha-timeline fate. You stare hard down at your shoes. Disney movies with baby animals were fucking sick; you knew the parents were doomed the moment their bushy tailed wide-eyed offspring pranced on screen in a field of daisies.

From this angle you’ve got a great view of Bro’s red blood slowly inking out across the ground like the sludgy rivers on LOWAS, so you take a few careful steps back. There's no reason to ruin your dope kicks. There are orange feathers scattered all around and floating in it, creamsicle on cherry, and you can’t really think about the implications of that right now. But their bright pigmentation makes his body look out of place and surreal against the sleepy blue color scheme of John’s world; it reminds you of image corruption, or ink bled through from one very different drawing to the next. Something in you suddenly cogs and jumps at that—the idea this could be a doomed timeline tearing and desperate in your chest. You think that it might be, that it probably is, and then you think that Rose would have something snide and vaguely comforting to say about coping mechanisms regarding all of this if she were here. And then you don’t think much of anything for a while.

You just stand in place, and the air whips around you. It’s the only thing that moves. The fireflies are stuck in the sky and the clouds are fixed like tar, and you feel like you’ve stepped out of the flow of time to stand unchanging with them.

Up here the wind kind of sounds like a white noise machine, you think absently, and you wonder if you'll ever work up the nerve to come back and take some samples. Probably not. You really hope Davesprite's ok. The collar of your shirt is itchy and heavy around your neck, and the nosepads of your iShades are pinching uncomfortably at the bridge of your nose, and their temples are pressing your cold sweat-damp hair tight against the sides of your skull—but it’s all mixed together, like a big cloud of static, and you can’t _stand_ it but you can’t begin to do anything about it. You're just a tangled mess. You're stuck here, just like the fireflies, and the clouds, and now Bro's body. With his own shitty sword struck through him. You can't even raise your head up to look at it properly.

And then suddenly your iShades hum and their screens flood with bright teal text, as you jerk your head up and time catches back up with you, all at once. So you suck it the fuck up. You push the shades back up as far as they can go and blink hard quickly to clear your eyes; your eyelashes get wet and heavy but your cheeks stay dry. There's a broken-sword schtick to follow through on here, after all, so it’s paramount that you switch to coolkid mode. Not that you’re ever not in coolkid mode. You are always cool, ice cold, so cold Egbert’s unfortunate teeth would wear themselves down to a slightly larger than normal size from chattering in the icy ass winter that is Dave Strider.

The first time you find a dead dave, you puke.

The second time you’re in your room, just trying to get a little down time from the oppressive heat of your new lava planet and its sludgy-dark sky. And also burn some weird mystic evil journals with a bunch of confusing meowing scrawled across one, and a really involved and possibly even more confusing wizard story jotted down in the other.

It’s lying stiff and red-streaked across one of your soundboards, next to where the journals used to be, suited up in the same swanky crimson velvet suit as you. It looks like getting those journals is above your paygrade.

There are rubble and wires and weird preserved dead things scattered all around it, probably knocked off your bookshelf by some shitty geologically themed imp. The crows don’t seem to mind, though. They’re perched on top of everything, flapping around and shedding inky feathers willy nilly, and shitting on everything like they just don’t have any shits left to give about the basic unwritten rules of being a houseguest. You’re used to the apartment being in disarray, but damn this place is trashed.

You guess you’re going to have to do something about it. Crows are definitely a symbol for death or morality or something, so between them and the literally dead fossils your room’s niche for weird / morbid things cluttering it up has already been filled several times over. Besides, dead Daves clogging up your room and leaking rivers of cherry blood all over the floor might make Terezi cream her weird troll biology, but it would probably freak Jade out, so you’ve really gotta ditch the dude here. No offense.

That decided, it only takes you 67 seconds to walk over and heft it up, cool as a fucking cucumber with little cuke-sized shades on. It’s heavier than you thought. You figure out pretty quickly that you’ll have to hold it in a fireman’s carry. But you’re not phased; you walk half-way across your room and lean it face up against the windowsill to chuck out, ice fucking cold. 

Of course, that’s the exact point when you fuck it all up. Its shades slide partly off, and you glance down and make eye contact, and suddenly you can’t move. You can’t tear your eyes away from how red its eyes are, and the way its mouth is stiffened in a grimace, and the feel of red velvet matted and damp under your fingers. The blood is congealed and sticky and venous and it’s coating your palms, and you’d drop the body if you weren’t frozen in place, staring at it. At _your_ body. Blood is caked onto its face like it’s caked onto you and it’s you, you died, you were scared and alone and in more pain than you’ve ever known until you hit a black wall of nothing and didn’t, anymore that is, feel anything ever again. 

You feel a little unsteady, and somehow the body’s outside and you’re on the other side of the room, staring down at your bright red hands. 

Your big bookshelf of fossils and petrified animals and things in jars of formaldehyde is standing tall behind you. You don’t count the seconds as you stand there, palms up and knees locked, so they don’t count either—just a little time out from the game. (But you’re the Knight of Time; you know all the seconds, all of them.)

The next day you take your collection of cool dead things up to the roof, and leave them there. The room was getting a little crowded.

EB: hey dave!   
TG: hey   
EB: so how’s all the time travel mumbo-jumbo going?   
TG: oh man   
TG: its totally chill   
TG: so chill, im basically flying off the handle here with how great it is   
TG: doing so many pirouettes in the air the centrifugibullshit force from my spinning keeps propelling me higher   
TG: id get a ten out of ten from some ornery old olympic officials if i landed but this plane aint ever coming down   
EB: wow dude don’t get your mixed metaphors in a knot!!   
EB: i guess not everyone can be as awesome as me at this game...  
EB: (hehehe)   
TG: no what   
TG: i fuckin own at this game   
TG: im having just about as much fun as a guy can have rigging a stock exchange with his devilishly handsome doubles believe you me  
EB: haha ok   
EB: actually, on that matter, can I be “real” with you for a second?   
EB: because im having trouble understanding what im supposed to do   
EB: and how to use my powers i guess   
EB: i think im supposed to master the wind and fly around maybe???   
EB: and like save all these hardworking salamanders to become some sort of salamander king   
TG: dude   
TG: my whole schtick is ripping off as many hardworking nakkodiles as possible   
TG: ive already charmed and outfoxed and crazy bullshit timeline manipulated my way to literally millions of bullshit crocodile money  
TG: i am so sicknasty at this game   
TG: but i don’t think what i have to do has much to do with your aquatic kingly destiny or whatever   
EB: wow you’re soooooooo impressive dave!!   
TG: its... mostly waiting around staving off lavaheatstroke and keeping track of a hundred beautifully choreographed and precisely planned time loops   
EB: wow, that sound lame, and also gross   
EB: i guess you’re use to it though?   
EB: all the texas heat or whatever   
EB: rose would probably have something smart to say about how my planet suits me too but i don’t know what that would be   
TG: yeah   
TG: well i mean you are an airhead so i guess it was just destiny   
EB: rude!!!   
TG: jk youre the wing beneath my wings id vote you salamander king any day   
TG: i mean i am glad i was the one to get time powers   
EB: DID YOU EVER KNOW THAT YOU’RE MY HEROOO?   
EB: YOU’RE EVERYTHING I WISH I COULD BEEEE!   
TG: not like you chumps could handle the sick flow of time anyway   
EB: I COULD FLY HIGHER THAN AN EAAGLEEEE!   
EB: YOU ARE THE WIND BENEATH MY WINGGGSS.   
TG: no i can hear your voice singing that inside my head this is not ok   
TG: im not sticking around to see those beautiful lyrics butchered anymore strider out   
EB: FLY, FLY, FLY AWAAAYYYYYY!   
EB: haha have fun swindling those nakodiles dave!!   


You and Davesprite find the third one together, lying prone in LOHAC’s colossal metal landscape against yet another huge useless gear. The gear’s frozen in place for some reason. The rest tick and echo out across sooty scaffolding and black empty sky, over-loud against the soft rush of lava running through the complicated network of tunnels beneath your feet. You’re not really sure what’s up with them or how they work, but your quests never involved them, so the complex system of intricately connecting heavily insulated pipes pumping molten hot lava 24/7 is probably just there for aesthetics. 

You guess that’s pretty cool. Davesprite and you both stare at the body until he looks down and away, and you blurt out that you’re glad Davesprite didn’t end up like it, like that.

Real smooth. Smoother than a sword’s edge.

His vivid orange frame is almost hard to look at straight as it clashes with the red and steel lit up all around you, and his glowing orange frames hide exactly what he’s looking at, but he mumbles if it came to that he’d have liked to be buried. You remember the weight of a body against a windowsill and the red underneath your nails you spent ten minutes (and 17 seconds) scrubbing away, and figure he’s still staring at it. So you tip back on your heels and glance around. There definitely isn’t any dirt in your cauterized land, but there’s a veritable ocean of lava; you guess you can at least give him a burial at sea. It, you guess you mean—Davesprite’s alive as a mystical sprite can be, so even if it’s for his sake it wouldn’t be his funeral.

You walk to sit down a few feet away, facing towards it, and Davesprite copies you. After a few beats you haltingly start to talk about how awesome you are as a form of eulogy, which Davesprite seems to appreciate, or at least he’s chill enough not to leave you hanging and goes along with it. Eventually you pull out a bag of Doritos, which you eat and Davesprite sort of absorbs, and you both end up with sticky artificial yellow powder all over the tips of your fingers. Some sick fires are started but mostly you talk about the artistic brilliance of the nacho comic arc, and how popular SBAHJ would have been. You also detail your impeccable taste in everything from movies to junk food to swords in full. Then there’s a long lull, and Davesprite’s just staring blankly out towards it, so you stand up and give him a meaningful glance. He rises up after you. You walk over to the body and Davesprite floats over; you fix your hands and eyes firmly on its arms, Davesprite takes the legs, and together you chuck it out to metaphorical sea. 

You’re too busy calculating how fast you can get home to wash your hands (three times in a row for thirty seconds each, five seconds in between each wash) to see the half-crumpled paper that falls out of its suit jacket a moment before hitting the red.

On the way back you do manage to tell Davesprite that it’s pretty chill how subversions like self-prototyping can save doomed Daves, and for a sweet minute or two (one minute and forty-two seconds) he just floats chilly next to you. Then he mumbles, one subversion, singular, unless you can find some other way to merge them with the structure of the alpha-verse—like a tick too far in to burn out. You look down, and aside, and after four seconds he drifts away towards some monsters that yield awesomely sicknasty amounts of grist. You keep on a beeline home with your fists locked at your sides, and beneath your feet the gleaming grid of metal repeats itself with perfect symmetry. 

The lava is interminable in every direction. 

TT: David.   
TG: oh lord what now lalonde   
TG: thats not my name btw not that you dont know that   
TT: Well then, would you rather I address you as the intrepid Hero of Time, working tirelessly to grease the metaphorical wheels of our unwieldy universe so that it can lumber on a few minutes longer?   
TT: Oh the sacrifice, oh the commitment; truly you are the only one of us who faithfully lives up to the title of Hero.   
TG: look i am really not in the mood for your violently purple cocktail of snark and meddlesome concern right now ok   
TT: That sounds like a drink my mother would love.   
TG: rose i swear if you get into the freudian shit im leaving right now   
TG: give it to me straight like i know its not your natural inclination but pretend for a second ok   
TT: You certainly seem keen to bring sexuality into our conversations.   
TT: However, I digress, as you have so astutely pointed out.   
TT: I’ve caught Davesprite up on this matter so I’m not sure how much you know, but the Rose from his timeline was able to partially merge with me.   
TG: woah what   
TT: Evidently you don’t know much about this. How much do you and Davesprite communicate, anyway?   
TG: we chill together   
TG: the truly cool dont need to talk to understand each other especially when were the same person   
TT: But, the point of the matter is, you’re really not. And the other Rose wasn’t exactly me either.   
TT: I’ve managed to retain some of her memories from that timeline, particularly ones regarding conversations we had about dead Daves.   
TT: Apparently being utterly doomed makes you more susceptible to accepting my therapy, I ought to take a note of that.   
TG: . . .   
TT: Is there anything in particular you’d like to talk about?   
TT: Perhaps, regarding certain sheets of parchment?   
TG: no   
TG: what   
TG: isnt this some sort of breach of doctor patient confidentiality like shouldnt other rose be stripped of her rights to offer therapy by the international conglomerate of very serious professional therapists   
TG: icvspt is capitalized   
TG: not that shed have had them in the first place since your therapy license is probably drawn in passive-aggressive purple crayon straight from the snarky horseshit colors pack   
TT: To be fair, she couldn’t exactly help it.   
TG: passive-aggressive purple is also capitalized but like only the ps   
TT: In any case, I suggest you do more than “chill” with Davesprite.   
TT: He has lots of valuable information about SBURB and our session in general, which evidently he hasn’t deemed necessary to share with you.   
TG: davesprites cool i mean hes literally me   
TG: he would have told me if there were anything important   
TT: ...Hmmmmm.   
TG: no no hmmmmming   
TT: ...   
TT: Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.   
TG: no   
TT: Well, I suppose you’ll see.   
TT: And when you do, I do hope you’ll choose to talk to a certain Seer again.   


\--  tentacleTherapist [TT]  ceased pestering  turntechgodhead [TG]  at 12:05 \--

When you find somewhere around the seventh one (exactly the seventh, and it’s only been 15 days and 4 hours and 26 seconds since you entered LOHAC—more like Land of Dead Daves and Deathtraps) you notice the singed edges of what looks like a piece of paper clutched in its fist.

Unfolding its hand is a little gnarly, but you do, and there’s a single sheet of paper there; you can tell it'd been folded carefully before being crumpled up. You open it with a bottomless sense of dread in your gut, chilly somehow despite the ever-oppressive heat that’s like a force-field pressing in on you, stifling and constant across your planet. You skim the first few lines.

The first thing that strikes you, immediately, is that you really wish Davesprite had come along with you for this incredibly exciting round of Basilisk Beatup: You Need To Grind For More Amber And Sulphur Yet Again Fucknut Edition. Just, you know, so you could chill in a feedback loop of your own awesomeness for a little while. And then maybe get around to asking him what the _fuck_ you just found in the chillest voice possible. But the feathery asshole’s flown off somewhere, possibly to hoard zoologically dubious things in yet another huge useless nest, instead of a bookshelf like any properly god-fearing dude would. You swear those things are lowering the property value of LOHAC.

So instead you sit hunched forward over the letter, lavaheat heavy and burning on the back of your neck, prickling with sweat. You hike your legs slightly up so the bare skin at your ankles isn’t pressing into the hot grating below you and read it, twice, then again and again and again.

At some point you realize you’re breathing too fast, and you fold the paper approximately back up along its creases before stuffing it into your pocket. Your stomach’s clenched and your head feels light and you’re really in no mood to go through the hilariously ironic motions of putting it into your sylladex. 

You put your hands up to your chest and try to slow your breathing, but it just makes you feel nauseous, and the lava is suddenly very bright and very far below your feet. You close your eyes and count the seconds as they pass. There are too many. You think about the letter again, and John with a bloody face and Rose with empty eyes and Jade with your sword straight through her, and that’s it—you scramble sideways, and the steel lattice is hot and grounding against your shins and hands, fingers through and fixed around the metal diamonds as you look down to the hazy glow between your retching head and miles of red-orange lava bubbling away. Your hands tremble. These dead Daves must be really bad for your stomach lining. You kinda feel like tipping over, but something tells you it wouldn’t be polite to leave without a note. You lean forward a little more anyway, and the metal bites uncomfortably into your palms with the shift in weight. Your hair is sticking to your head with sweat like usual but you’re panicking and you can’t stand it now, can’t stand any of this, the constant heat and steel and—you have to go. You have to go back, you need to go back, to when the worst you had to complain about was the heat.

So you take out your Timetables and go back as far as you can.

As it turns out, the universe is just like one of bro’s shitty Xbox games, because as far back as you can go you hit a glitchy invisible wall of nothing. A wave of static and void crashes over you, pushing you back; you’re not sure exactly when it tosses you to, but it’s definitely before you entered the session. Your head is fuzzy as you stagger upright over the same metal grating and empty sky, body suddenly lit up cold all over. Beginning-of-time LOHAC is as frigid as the Batterwitch’s heart, what will be lava frozen and near-metallic so that the whole planet is monochrome, and absolutely silent without the ever-present burbling of lava. It’s all shades of red though, despite there being no discernible source of light, and you’re not really sure why you can see at all. The sweat on your bare skin feels like it’s icing over but your chest is unbareably hot. Maybe Rose would know, but time is sunk into your bones not light; you can feel that Beat Mesa isn’t spinning even though you’re nowhere near it. You can also feel that if you try to push back further in time you’ll get caught up in the invisible wall like characters get caught in the stairs from Mad Snacks Yo, forever grinding down with hellacious hunger infinitely unsated. You don’t wanna think about what that would do to you, and anyway you’ve been warned about stairs bro you’d be a chump to just ignore that, and anyway you’re still sorta freaking out so you gotta just—sit for a second. You slide back against a hard frozen gear and put your head between your knees and breathe and breathe, because even now you can’t get away from the red sunk into your fucking cherry (bloodstained) life, and you think you understand Karkat’s aversion a bit. 

He’s still an asshole though.

You sit there for a long, long time with your hands clenched around your knees, sniffling and gulping down air. It’s overwhelmingly loud in the stillness. Beneath it you can hear your heart beat in your chest, and your blood pump up in your head around your ears, and the way air catches and burbles in your throat.

The universe stretches out dark and empty and endless around you. Its void leeches your body heat slowly and steadily, and you realize you’ve never felt this cold. 

But it’s kind of nice, you think. Like snow maybe. You stretch your back up and tip your head back, and immediately jerk forward at the feel of icy-cold metal against the very bare back of your head. Then you breathe out sharply through your nose because wow, you gotta chill, this is totally uncool. Bro would smack you so hard with his shitty fucking swords for how blurry your vision is—gotta clean your shades regularly, smudge marks make the difference between a pretentious slob and a master of irony. Your head pounds and throbs and aches against the stillness, and your blood is rushing through your veins like lava through pipes. Your eyes are swollen and your chest feels like it’s been cleaned out by steel wool. You think whoever made this universe must be a total slob; invisible walls are lazy programming, and glitchy ones are just shoddy. No wonder you’re always having to clean up after the universe’s would-be-paradoxes. There’s no safety mechanism in place and isn’t that stupid— 

But then you realize, of course, it’s you. You’re the windup mechanism that keeps it all together, the clockwork kid that goes with the flow because the whole universe and therefore him couldn’t exist otherwise. Everything you do is pre-ordained, except when it’s not, and then you’re doomed as punishment and the universe unravels around you. 

Then again, you think, you’re not punished as much as everyone else is. You clench your fists at that, fingernails biting into your palms like the press of thin metal. Rose’s wit and John’s derpy smile and Jade’s stupidly adorable laugh are nothing in the face of reality itself unwinding, and so they’re unwound, unmade. You only die. 

You wonder if there’s any difference, if dying is really any better—you think it shouldn’t be, and then you really stop and think about being unmade so that you never existed, never had a chance to do anything, never left a mark behind that showed you made rad comics or dropped sick beats or even breathed. And it terrifies you far, far more than death. You start breathing faster and pull your knees in tighter. The air around you keeps on not-ticking. A wave of relief hits you when you realize that it will never happen, you can always prevent it, and then guilt follows up with a hard sock in the gut because it turns out you really are glad you were the one to get time powers. Your fists clench tighter, crescent pain sharper. You’re glad your friends are unmade instead of you. You can’t not feel relieved because the alternative of being unmade yourself is unthinkably terrifying, and in this moment you are absolutely fucking sure you’re the only one of the four who will never live up to the title of Hero. 

They all deserved so much better. 

That, of course, must have been why you wrote the note; because they deserved better than you and didn’t get it, but this way they at least left a mark on the alpha timeline, no matter how small. At least someone would remember them. You think your palms are bleeding, but you check carefully—palpating the skin with sweaty ice-cold fingers—and they’re not. You sit there in the dark, running your wet fingerpads compulsively over the undersides of your hands, over and over, unable to convince yourself they’re unbroken. The metal grating’s practically freezing your ass off. Slowly and horrifically you come to the realization that you’ve always loved collecting the remnants of dead things: caught up in amber and formaldehyde, viscous like the pull of time. A collection implies plurality, and besides, you’ve always been a hoarder.

So you stand up stiffly and take out your Timetables again, to spin on back to glowing-warm LOHAC, and search for the dead bodies you didn’t bury days and weeks ago because you were too busy—rigging stocks and slicing monsters and dropping sick beats all day long. (But you’re the Knight of Time; you have all the time, all of it.) You know what you’ll find, because it’s what you would have done, every time. You don’t know what you were expecting, not checking from the start.

TG: what the fuck man  
TG: why wouldnt you tell me about the letters  
TG: we both know wed never even buy that book as a joke but im still pretty sure what you did violates the bro code in about twenty different unironically uncool ways  
TG: oh  
TG: shit  
TG: yeah oh shit did you think i wouldnt ever notice??  
TG: look i fucked up early on enough that i only found a few notes  
TG: i didnt know if thered even be any here and that wasnt really a conversation i wanted to have  
TG: ever i guess  
TG: well too fuckin bad were having it now and do you know what happens when you try to repress something?  
TG: it comes back all crazy and pissed off  
TG: i am crazily pissed off right now  
TG: wonderfalls was a really good show  
TG: fuck yes it was and fuck you for trying to derail this by pointing out the sweet perfection of the best american comedy of the early 2000s  
TG: we couldve been having a great time laughing it up making more references and plans to have john finally watch it but no  
TG: you had to hide the little fact that when were doomed we start scrawling maudlin on pieces of paper like a preteen with their first adult diary  
TG: no more ponies on the cover and suddenly their entries go from what dolls they want for christmas to how much the ennui of the universe is crushing their small tortured soul  
TG: dude its not even that big of a deal look i thought about it and they were only a distraction to me i wished i had never found them  
TG: wasting time getting misty over pieces of paper could be interfering enough to fuck you over and id rather there were one less doomed timeline than have a perfect transcript of what happened in it before it got undone  
TG: so dont get your apple-patterned knickers in a twist  
TG: jesus maybe rose was right   
TG: were not fucking the same person youre just a cowardly pretender   
TG: at least all the other doomed daves bothered to honor their friends memories and no amount of references to rad undergarments i havent gotten around to alchemizing but you apparently have will make you a real dave  
TG: that was uncalled for  
TG: you need to grow up and get used to the fact that as shitty as this universe is were stuck as its butt-puppet just like jaye  
TG: and the only way to mitigate the damage is to do what the little smoosh faced wax lion says immediately instead of pussyfooting around trying to have free will and putting your feelings over our friends lives  
TG: so get used to it  


turntechGodhead [TG]  blocked  turntechGodhead [TG]  at 3:23

You hate counting, but it’s a compulsion at this rate. The dead Dave spilling his guts across the trading floor is number twenty-three and his letter is the twenty-first (that you’ve read, anyway).

Honestly, you’re resigned to never stopping. It’s like whatever; you were literally born for this reluctant hero schtick, come at me bro. It never really comes at you, and you were never really one for coming right at things. More like waiting your ass around for a jumped up coffee-addicted nakodile to make a sweet move on the market, so you can suckle it’s teat for boondollers like a babe and a cow—a giant, cash cow. What you’re saying is this baby’s gonna get sick as shit from suckin on all that dirty money, didn’t its momma ever raise it better? Your metaphors are getting too weird to tell even John or Terezi these days.

Instead you spend most of your time leaning against a sweltering stone wall and looking hella chill in the trading room, surrounded by dates and times and figures, all perfectly under your control. Of course, the only two numbers that really count are constantly augmenting on a slow rolling ticker inside you: 21 and 19, 22 and 20, 23 and 21, predictable and immutable. Technically you could stop pushing the alpha-verse on and stall the ticker forever, but only in exchange for dooming everyone and dying just to up some other poor sap’s ticker. You slouch against a pillar and put your hands in your pockets, staring vaguely in the direction of a couple amped-up nakodiles. They’re either freaking out about your double’s body or a crazy jump in some company’s value you orchestrated weeks ago. Maybe both. 

You press the back of your skull against the stone and look up. The ceiling is stop sign red and absolutely cavernous. A while ago you really did try retiring your Timetables, figuring if by some dumb Vriska-level luck you were the alpha Dave and stopped spinning sick beats through time, then the universe would have to sort itself out. (But you’re the fucking Knight of Time; you know it doesn’t work that way.) Only seven seconds after you made the decision, chose to toss your bullshit title and aspect aside because you didn’t deserve it anyway, future-you showed up with a beaglepuss over his shades and shook his head. So you hated yourself a little more thoroughly and ripped up the letter that made you try it, number ten from dead Dave twelve.

His Jade had taught herself to actually play the flute. You had wondered why he’d start off her description that way, and why she’d waste her time on that with all the bullshit missions in SBURB, but it turned out you out you told her for once. You told her the universe was unravelling around her, and all she did was smile that goofy smile and say it was okay, and at least now she had the time to learn to play it right. You press your back against the stone harder as you remember that, shoulder blades digging into the thin layer of skin and muscle between them and the pillar. 

You don’t know why that hit you so hard, made you feel so helpless, but it did. Maybe it was just the timing, all the letters from before stacking up on top of it. Maybe it was that it was the only part of the letter you could read properly—dead Dave numero doce left behind a pretty bloodstained account. His whole body was stained in red too, but all you had been able to feel was contempt for him, sprawled out messily on your roof. By then you’d figured out enough to know you’re the final nail in the coffin; when you leave an unraveling universe there’s nothing relevant to the alpha timeline left in it, so it’s definitively unmade. Any second you stay longer is another possible second for any unfortunately alive friend. You’ve still found twenty-three bodies of cowards that should have stayed longer, stayed until the very end with everyone else. (They were afraid to not exist. It’s gotten to the point you can’t really begrudge them that anymore.)

But now the twenty-first letter is tucked away in your sylladex, and you honestly haven’t felt this happy in ages, it’s like a fucking shower of absolution. You can practically feel the choirs of baby cherubs pissing apple juice down on you like those creepy garden statues brought to life. You, at least, have access to John and Rose and Jade—but not Terezi and the other trolls. Up until now you’ve had to believe Terezi took herself out, but you’ve never been sure, and this letter’s your holy grail; you know how to save her. You never should have been talking to her in the first place. All you need to do is message their time player—Aradia—and suggest she stock up on some sweet snacks, put on some sick beats, and get an uncannybrutal “corpse party” started. That phrase is, apparently, essential.

You guess you’re going to have to get to know her. You wonder what she did, how she coped, if she left letters and bodies scattered all over her land. You wonder if her land was as red as yours. You wonder if her letters were always so painfully sincere, if they ever got so rambley and sappy she felt embarrassed for herself, and you doubt it. You think, maybe, that you won’t message her unless you’re sure your timeline’s doomed. Who knows, maybe you’re the alpha Dave and you’ll be able to avoid the whole uncomfortable conversation altogether, and as a bonus never have to ask your friends how they’d like to die. 

Well, Jade; Rose is partial to poison and John’s big about explosions, but as far as you can tell you’ve never been able to bring yourself to ask her.

Then again, talking to Aradia sounds awkward enough. You figure if you’re the alpha Dave (and you don’t like considering the alternative) you owe the others at least taking that burden off their shoulders, and wander out of the trade floor as you open Pesterchum.

TG: hey  
GG: whats up?  
TG: oh youre online already  
TG: good  
TG: so like this is a weird question but hey humor me im all about weird ironic questions right  
GG: ummmmm.... ._.  
TG: so i guess lets not jump right into it umm  
TG: your grandpa was really into hunting things right like did you ever go along and do that with him  
TG: maybe know a way he taught you to idk put them out of their misery when they were trapped that made it not so bad  
GG: to be honest dave i was really uncomfortable with how much he killed things, i didnt exactly tag along :\  
GG: dave are you ok??  
GG: if you need to talk about anything i am always here for you!!!  
GG: i know this game can be pretty tough and sometimes i am very scared about what will happen to us  
GG: but i also have a good feeling that things will all end up working out! :)  
TG: yeah im pretty intimately aware of that process  
TG: uh anyway  
TG: you know what never mind i dont think i really thought this through  
TG: im fine dont even worry about it pretend this pesterlog never happened like seein a drunk guy in a fountain or something  
TG: walk on by and pretend you werent just witness to something hella embarrassing you know to protect my delicate feelings and all i didnt mean to be this weird  
GG: dave??  
TG: ok bye   
GG: dave wait!!!  


\--  turntechGodhead [TG]  ceased pestering  gardenGnostic [GG]  at 1:56 --

GG: :\

Like you said, you’re a coward. You don’t like considering the alternative.

You sigh and get ready to take out your Timetables again, but your glasses buzz and it’s Terezi, champing at the bit for another fix of the sweet, delicious, cherry-flavored, sweet, _sweet_ commodity that is your precious time. She’s pulling some dramatic Twoface coin bullshit and being cryptic about whether or not you reach god tier. It’s just about giving you a migraine, and the bright glare of lava and metal outside isn’t helping. 

It’s a little hard for you to care about the conversation, honestly. You’re not sure whether you’d feel like more or less of a fake if you ever got those snazzy red pajamas on, and you’re extra unsure how comfortable you’d be with wearing red everywhere. Red capes are a pretty staunchly heroic symbol after all, and you don’t think you could stand mitigating that impression by ironically doing your hair in a slicked back single-curl superman-do every day. There is probably not enough wax in the universe. As you calculate exactly how much wax it would take (the answer: probably a trillion times the amount that actually exists, you are very good with numbers) Terezi directs you to a red stone slab in a red stone cavern and tells you to get some shut-eye on it. There is no reasoning with this crazy broad and the crazy things she asks you to do, so you lie down.

When you do, you almost ironically ask her to sing you a lullaby, and it makes you think of Bro. He used to sing you proper bedtime songs, like Baby Beluga and shit, back before you could understand he wasn’t totally sincere about it. Probably. He used to talk more too, when you were young. He spoke enough for your brain to do that thing where it learns all the little sounds that make up your language, and you watched Sesame Street, and then for a while he’d do dichotomous splicings of character voices—childish ones, funny ones, terrifying ones—and play them back as if they were all his voice. But that stopped pretty quick, around the same time you started checking every single enclosed space in your room over a few square inches for Lil Cal ten times before you could go to bed. Unless that’s only your mind playing tricks on you. You were pretty damn young. 

You don’t know. Seems like the sort of inscrutable cool shit he’d pull though; maybe you were just too small to appreciate it. You never really knew with Bro to be honest, just like you don’t know what inscrutable moves he’s making now, or why he raised you to have rad sword skills and a perfect poker face instead of proper social skills. Not that you really need those with the apocalypse and everything. You stare up at the cavern's cherry ceiling. The smooth rock is hot and hard beneath you but you can’t remember the last time you slept, and your eyes are already half-shut, head lolled back. You wonder vaguely if that’s why Bro kept up the mysterious ninja bullshit, if he knew what would happen with his ineffable fucking cool dude powers and didn’t want you to flip your shit if he made a wrong move and couldn’t be around to protect you anymore. Or maybe he wanted you to be able to stand on your own because he had to, as a single parent/guardian/brother.

Or hell, maybe he just marathoned too much Naruto and it scarred him permanently. There’s no use worrying about him; the dude can take care of himself. You close your eyes and try to let go, hard rock pressing into the back of your skull.

He sliced a meteor in half for you. 

You don’t know.

You shift and turn over onto your stomach, tired, and fall asleep on stone.

You feel like there’s a knot of fire burning in your chest. Terezi’s just fucked you over here. 

You’re not sure if she really understands what making a doomed Dave does, to be fair. The fact that she just doomed an entire goddamned universe—including an alternate version of herself—to being undone. It is a time thing, and you’re not too clear on the whole coin flipping mind trick she just pulled.

But then again, she is from a predatory alien race that encourages killing other alien kids to build character, and she has built up a whole lot of character. She may just not give a fuck. You forget that sometimes. You remember it now as you pester her casually, half on snark autopilot and half to suss out the exact details of how much she’s screwed everything over. You’ve spent so much time bonding over shitty memes and even shitter drawings that you’ve lost track of these important cultural differences, but you’re back on that track now—chugging down the steel rails like a five-thousand-ton locomotive two hours late for a very important passenger. You’re not sure there’s a lot you can do now that you’ve started down this track. Your survival instinct is telling you very clearly that you don’t show weakness to predators, and you hope fleetingly she never saw any of your burials.

You have your sword out as you pester her, standing on a bed built of blood red rock in a cave made from bright red stone. There’s a doomed Dave in a bright green velvet suit sprawled out below you, sleeping like a baby, shhhhhhh only dreams for him now—and probably forever soon. Unless you kill him and he goes god tier, and that makes him better suited to beating the game, which would probably make you the doomed Dave. You think _there can only be one_ , in the proper stupid accent for that reference. And then you think that a god might be able to understand that better. Or even fix it. You think a god might be able to protect your friends better. And suddenly your heart’s palpitating and your palms are sweaty and your feet are cold and you are so, so afraid, because this is it.

This is the moment where a hero sacrifices himself, the moment all doomed Daves face, willingly or not. Symbolically you’ll be doing it by stabbing the other Dave, but it’ll be your doomed body hitting the floor soon enough after he rises up to save everyone—your soon-to-be redundant ass six miles deep in lava or empty-eyed on the trading room floor. You wonder if you’ll die before you hit the ground, if it’ll be quick. You wonder if you'll have time to wax embarrassingly sappy in your letter. You’re not sure which you’d prefer.

It’s not like you get to decide anyway, because you may need to indirectly off yourself here, but you don’t have the guts to physically kill yourself. You tighten your grip around the damp, bone white handle of your sword. Your hands are shaking slightly, and once you notice that a full-body shiver runs through you, persisting in your arms. Terezi’s in full swing expositing so you’ve got a little time here, and it’s the first time post-apocalypse you’re not sure how much—probably more than a minute, less than ten, as vague as every other timeframe used to be. You feel up in the air, disconnected, a poorly tossed ball missing its intended juggalo’s shittily painted hand by a dozen yards just to smack some poor Faygo guzzling sod in the back row. This is what it’s like to be doomed. It’s terrifying, but you guess it’s better than knowing exactly when you’ll die. You’ve still got time.

So you focus on working up your resolve in the meantime. Bro didn’t teach you a lot of things, but at least he prepared you for this, and it turns out this is all you really had to be prepared for. Going out with honor like a samurai or some shit. You can’t quite tell if you feel hot or cold. The lava red heat of LOHAC makes you sweat so hard the back of your neck and arms feel chilly with evaporation, sometimes. You think about what it means to have honor, and being better than feathery orange assholes. Your heart's beating red in your chest. You think about creating universes where Rose keeps her hard-worn knowledge, and you learn John’s secrets straight from the source not wrinkled lines of cherry text, and Jade never stops smiling or ever has to learn the fucking flute.

(She was probably shit at it anyway. You almost laugh but it’s just your teeth chattering.)

You glance back up at the teal text scrolling down your shades, and Terezi’s still laying it on thick, caught up in her own cleverness. You’re almost dizzy with gratefulness as you reply. You've got a little more time. You can feel your eyes watering a bit behind your shades at that; you’re not sure if you could bring your sword down right now, your arms are locked so tight. But you're going to have to soon. So you try thinking about death, and how you’re going to die eventually, no matter what you do here. You think about what death would be like and how easy it should be—knowing you’re going to die anyway and getting to assuage your guilt by doing the right thing for once, then chillaxing for eternity as a blank-eyed soul in some corner of the dream-o-sphere. Your arms untense and still a little.

And then you think about how the universe needs you to keep trying, and characters going off to live in dreamland when they die is the sort of cop-out only children’s stories and fairy tales use, even if the doomed Daves all corroborated it. All the proof they had of an afterlife was from their SBURB-regulated dreams. You think about how only doomed Daves get dreams of an afterlife, and how whoever designed this universe may be a slob but they’re efficient as fuck, a master of memory management. Your hands harden in a death-grip around your sword. You think about how much memory one person, all their hopes and dreams and billions of complex cells and bacteria and thoughts, could really be compressed to. If the entirety of your soul is really worth conserving in full a thousand times over across paradox space. You think about Bro making shadow puppets on the walls when you were young. A black wave of dread comes along with that thought, washing over you, like it washed the soul right out of you. It’s not a certainty; it’s just the sliver of a possibility of non-existence. Your legs still start shaking and you swallow heavily and your knees almost buckle, but they don’t.

It’s almost fair, you tell yourself, clenching your jaw up. You have to trade your death to be a hero like anyone else in the game, only in your case the death is permanent. You breathe in firmly and close your eyes. You tune Terezi completely out for a second, and you think about ruby Daves and John struck through with that same red and you think about Karkat, inexplicably, and chivalry.

And then you open your eyes and look down at your double sprawled out on red rock. You think about blood, and death and how much it could hurt. Sword through muscle and sinew. You think about how Bro had always said he wanted to go out in a sword fight, and how small and useless it made you feel the first time he said it. And every time after. Your arms are shivering and clenching and they lower slightly under the weight of your sword, slippery and comically big for your frame. You have to respond to Terezi again, and it makes you think about how this is her fucking fault, and it’s not fucking fair to die for her decisions. Somewhere in the teal text she points out reality is formed by your decisions; you think spitefully that you orbit around a chessboard planet and pawns can't decide much of anything, only advance to be exchanged or stand static in place to be picked off just like you.

But you know that metaphor’s shit. You’re not a carapace you're a Knight, and time isn’t static—it spins on like a spindle and is always, always unraveling and pulling you backwards, caught up and untangled in turns by your decisions. You think that Rose would like the yarn-based comparison. You think about that idea dying with you. You shiver standing over your double in the heat of LOHAC in a red room; one of you is going to have to die.  
You are afraid to not exist.  
You are so, so afraid. You feel sick to your bones. Your chest burns.  
You are afraid to not exist.  
You’re only thirteen.  
You are afraid to not exist.  
In the back of your mind you figure if you throw up any more you won’t have any stomach lining left, and swallow, thick and painful. Your palms are damp, and they're shaking. And in this desperate moment, you’re struck with an absolute terrible clarity; you know that you’re the alpha Dave. All the other Daves died fighting against fate, against the universe, stubborn underdogs to death like any good tragic hero. But you’re their modern rip off, the cheap gritty remake, the antihero.

You’re too afraid. The universe needs a coward that does whatever necessary to keep himself and it running—and you’re the butt-puppet of the universe, tailored perfectly to its needs, because you don’t have it in you to do this. You really, really don’t.  
You are afraid to not exist.  
You're hollow.  
You are afraid to not exist.  
Your arms drop like deadwood.  
You are afraid to not exist.  
Your chest catches on your breath as your heartbeat steadies, and then your breathing comes easier. You're relieved. God, Jesus, Mary and that one donkey that’s always in those dinky little tabletop nativities, you’re so fucking relieved. It’s utter absolution. It almost makes you vomit. 

You stand there blissed to the moon and back for almost a whole minute before Terezi gets through enough of her bragging bullshit to ask you what you’ll do, and then you do what's necessary to push your own personal universe on. You give your excuses, nonchalant coolkid mode dialed up to the max—head a little floaty. You don’t even care that it wasn’t exactly a minute. Who the fuck cares. This is the way it has to be. Your face is flushed but your stomach settles.

She asks you if you’re sure, and you pause for a fair moment when you think about John, and Bro. You think about heroes.  
You are only thirteen and you are afraid to not exist.  
And then you walk away, teal words about things that never were and never will be smudging your vision. Your gut should be sick with guilt, but it’s not. You think about death and unravelling and nothingness and you are so, so relieved. You shiver with it. You think about cherry red blood on your hands, and unclench them around your sword; you are not a hero. You’re so fucking glad.

TG: alright then   
TG: i guess thats enough of this horseshit time to move on right   
GC: SUR3   
GC: 1F YOU R34LLY W4NT TO L34V3 POOR DOOM3D D4V3 H3R3 TO H1S OWN D3V1C3S   
TG: i dont even want to be around when he wakes up itll be weird and awkward   
GC: 1 DONT SUPPOS3 1 COULD T4LK YOU 1NTO PUTT1NG H1M OUT OF H1S M1S3RY B4S3D ON TH3 R3SULT OF 4 CO1N FL1P >:D   
TG: no fuck no   
TG: put your fucking death coin away jesus   
TG: i am forbidding you from ever flipping that coin again when youre talking to me or even thinking about me   
GC: F1N3!!!! WOW D4V3   
GC: SO TOUCHY 4BOUT 4 S1LLY L1TTL3 CO1N   
GC: YOUR3 OV3R3ST1M4T1NG 1TS R3L3V4NC3 H3R3 4NYW4Y   
GC: 1N F4CT   
GC: 4FT3R 1 FL1PP3D 1T, 1 D1DNT 3V3N LOOK 4T TH3 R3SULT!   
TG: what you didnt   
GC: NOP3   
GC: D4V3, WHY WOULD 4 BL1ND G1RL LOOK 4T 4 CO1N SH3 C4NT 3V3N S33?  
GC: 1T DO3SNT M4K3 S3NS3!   
TG: thats fucking idiotic

Your face is smooshed uncomfortably against the red stone, skin and green velvet sticking slightly in the ever-present heat, and when you sit up nothing’s changed. Terezi must be jerking your chain over here like an overenthusiastic kid trying to drag around their worn out old dog. You stand up and pester her, and of course she sends back an inscrutable frowning smiley in reply. This is fucking idiotic.

Suddenly there’s a flash of electric black behind you, and you turn and see bro’s shades on a dark furry snout. Before you can wonder what the fuck’s up with that, there’s a bright spray of red from your neck, and more pain than you’ve ever known—and all you can feel is overwhelming fear and pain in the ten seconds before you hit a black wall of nothing and don’t, anymore that is, feel anything ever again.

TG: well maybe i never wanted to be a knight of time   
TG: maybe id rather just be like   
TG: the dave of guy  
TG: you know just some dude   


**Author's Note:**

> Dave’s a crybaby nerd and if you felt for him during this story so r u.  
> (Bonus nerd points if you caught the white text the first time around.)
> 
> Also… go watch Wonderfalls if you haven’t seen it yet. Trust me.


End file.
